


Boredom

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [45]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 22:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15446802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: When he was younger, feeling bored used to mean Ezra was feeling better. He doesn’twantthat right now.





	Boredom

A red dot flashed in the corner of Ezra’s datapad, it was small, but it was bright red and very distracting. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it, but it was impossible. It had been designed to distract; to pull the datapad user’s attention away from whatever they were doing so that they could deal with the issue that someone was trying to alert them to. **  
**

As if reading wasn’t difficult enough already.

He already knew what it was; a personal message from someone else on base. If he wanted it to go away, all he needed to do was open it, and read what the sender had to say.

He wasn’t going to do that. The only message he had ever received in that way before had been from Noisi, telling him to make an appointment. The chances of this one being from anybody else or for any other reason were too slim to even consider. He was long overdue for a checkup now. The droid was probably eager to see the syndrome in action, maybe cheer it on a little and tell Ezra how happy he was to be able to study it.

That didn’t sound like a fun way to spend an afternoon, so Ezra placed his finger over the flashing light and tried, once again, to concentrate on what he was reading.

It made no difference.  He still knew it was there.

He sighed loudly, frustrated with himself more than with the datapad, or even the med-droid. He had been reading the same paragraph for the past ten minutes, finding himself distracted not just by the flashing dot, but by the size of the font he was using, and by wondering how long it would be before he needed to increase it again.

He supposed that meant it was time to give up and do something else. With another sigh, he closed the program. The last file he had been using was still open underneath it, and he found himself staring down at a visual representation of the patterns of dots that made up the tactile alphabet.

He looked at the page for a few moments, both fascinated and repulsed by the idea. He wasn’t going to learn it. There was no point. But, he couldn’t help thinking, at least if he had been reading with his fingers, the flashing light wouldn’t have been bothering him.

And that summed up fairly accurately how much he wanted to avoid Noisi. If he was seriously considering the benefits of the tactile alphabet as a way to avoid messages from him, he needed to get away from that blinking light.

He switched off the datapad and tossed it onto the surface of his bunk. It landed near his feet, and he nudged it toward the wall with a toe to ensure that it wouldn’t fall off the bunk if he moved. He stretched, and shifted his position a little. He was bored; caught between the desire to get up and do something, and the lethargy that had plagued him on and off over the past few weeks. The feeling; the clash between the two needs, was familiar to him. It stirred memories in him that he visited only occasionally now, and never deliberately.

When Ezra was six, he had caught a fever. It had been nothing dangerous, or life-threatening – at least, he didn’t  _think_  it had been. It hadn’t even been one of the usual childhood illnesses that plagued the kids the galaxy-over; just a run-of-the-mill sickness that could have been picked up from anyone or anywhere around the city. If the rest of his life had gone the way he had expected at the time, he doubted that he would even remember it anymore. As it happened, it had been the last time he had been sick at home, with his parents there to care for him, and so the memory had stuck.

He had revisited it, against his will, every time he had shivered on the streets of Lothal; every time his body, weak from lack of food and exposure to the elements, had succumbed to one infection or another. Every time he had felt weak and tired, or in pain, and he had been alone and needed to fend for himself, he had thought about his mother’s hand on his brow checking for his temperature, and his father bringing him a bowl of the soup he had been able to smell cooking in the kitchen. He had thought about each of them sitting with him on the edge of his bed, telling stories until he fell asleep.

And although he wasn’t technically ‘sick’ right now, he had visited those memories recently too, as he had settled down into bed each night since his diagnosis. Hera and Kanan filled the role almost completely, they were his family now, but they were not his parents. Not really. He found himself preoccupied with how his mother or his father might have reacted to the news. He wondered whether he would have told them, or whether he would have kept it a secret there too. He wondered whether they would have looked after him like he was a kid again; tucked him into bed with hugs and declarations that everything was going to be okay, or whether they would have carried on normal around him.

They must have known, he realized, that this could have been lurking in his future. Sacul Syndrome was genetic, and although from what he had read, having a relative with the syndrome was no guarantee, it was in his father’s family. His father’s aunt had it, that meant one of his father’s parents might have had it too. It was close. They had to know that it was likely to strike again. They wouldn’t have expected it  _now_  of course, not when it was supposed to begin in middle age, but they had to have known that it could happen one day.

Would they have prepared him for the possibility? Would they have talked about it, told him the facts? Reassured him? Had him tested for it? The blood test Noisi had done at that first appointment had been enough to confirm what Ezra had long suspected. Surely that was something that could have been done before symptoms showed; your genes didn’t change.

If his parents had lived, might he have known in advance that this was going to happen?

It still would have been thirty years too soon, of course, and it would have happened far more quickly than they might have prepared him for, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether being forewarned would have made a difference.

And what about his father? Had he just been a carrier, or had he, too harbored the mutation that would have eventually taken his sight? Perhaps, if he had lived, they would have been going through this at the same time.

Ezra wasn’t sure whether that would have been better or worse.

It didn’t matter anyway; he would never know the answers to those questions, and so they were irrelevant.

He shifted on the bunk again, still trying to decide whether it would be better to get up and find something to do, or to simply lie there and suffer the boredom. The fever, the last illness his parents had nursed him through, had passed quickly. He remembered sitting on his bed, drinking a cup of the warm folk remedy concoction his mother swore would heal any illness, and declaring that he was bored.

His father had laughed, and Ezra hadn’t understood until his mother had explained. “It’s a good thing. If you’re bored, that means you’re getting better.“

He had been right, too. The following day, Ezra had been up and about, back to more-or-less his normal self. The day after that, he had been shipped off back to his lessons, and the whole thing had been forgotten, by his parents at least.

His father’s words had held true every time since then. The first hint that he was getting better was always that twinge of boredom as he found himself caught between what he wanted to do — or what he felt that he should be doing — and what he was able to do. He came to welcome it, because on the streets, illness could easily mean death.

But he wasn’t getting better, not this time. There was no getting better from this, there was only a long progression of getting worse. Somewhere along that road, it made sense that he might start to feel… not better, but… less bad about it. But not yet.

He reached inside himself, searching for the pain and the rising sense of panic that had been his companions over the past weeks since this had become official, and found them exactly where he had left them. He fed them images of helplessness, memories of Kanan in the weeks following Malachor, and the thought of darkness without end. They responded exactly as they always had, growing inside his mind until he could think of little else.

He felt an unexpected surge of relief at that, and realized as he did, that he didn’t  _want_  to feel better. Not yet. He wanted to learn how to move on, he wanted to perfect the techniques that Kanan was going to teach him, and learn how to cope with what was happening; he wanted to feel happy again one day, but he didn’t ever want to be okay with what was happening.

He shuffled backward on the bunk, straightened his back, and pulled his legs into a crossed position. He took a slow, deep breath, concentrating on the sensation of the air filling his lungs, on the pressure as he held the breath in place, and the release as he exhaled. He had come back to his quarters with the intention of trying to meditate, not hopeful that it would really help, but willing to give it a try if Kanan thought it might. Instead, he had sat on the bed and done nothing, which was – despite what Kanan liked to tell him – basically the same thing.

There was no point trying it now, he wasn’t in the right frame of mind, if such a thing even existed, but he could still use one of the techniques that Kanan had shown him to center himself and to banish the negative feelings, release them into the Force. He would always be able to find them again later, when he needed them.

He was still bored. It  _didn’t_  mean he was feeling better, it just meant he needed something to do. He had never been out of the action for this long before, there must come a point where no matter what else was happening, he just craved something else to think about, or to do. He ran his hands through his hair and glanced around the room, searching for something to occupy his mind. Not surprisingly, he found nothing. Defeated, he moved to the side of the bunk and jumped down onto the floor below.

* * *

Making the decision to do something had been easy, but actually  _finding_  something to do was more of a problem. Most of his downtime lately had been spent hanging out with Hobbie and the dokma, or when he was feeling braver, closing his eyes and trying not to feel too frustrated at his lack of comprehension of the world going on around him. He didn’t want to do either of those now. He hadn’t made any progress with the dokma recently, and if he wanted to sit around doing nothing, he could have stayed in his quarters and meditated.

He wasn’t sure what time it was, but it hadn’t been so long since he had gotten up, and the position of the sun told him it was still morning, or early afternoon at the latest. Hobbie was on duty until the evening today. He supposed nobody would object if he headed over there and hung out with the pilots, but he didn’t particularly want company. Not that much company anyway. He could have tolerated Hobbie, and even Wedge, but there would be other people there and he just wasn’t in the mood.

You never knew what people were going to say.

Two engineers that he vaguely recognized brushed past him, on their way to to the other side of the base, deep in an intense conversation that was beyond his knowledge level. Ezra watched them go, then turned his attention elsewhere.

Around him, people were rushing in all directions, it wasn’t the hurried sprint of an unfolding crisis, but simply people eager to get on with their assigned tasks. Snippets of conversation drifted in and out of earshot. He got the occasional nod from casual acquaintances, and a wave from some distance away, from someone whose face he couldn’t make out. He waved back, then spun around, picking a new direction for his aimless walking.

Seeing other people have something to do, did nothing to alleviate his own boredom. If anything, it made it worse.

It was his own fault, he knew that. He was the one that had decided that being off active duty meant not doing anything. The morning after Sato had told him he was off missions, Ezra had made a decision. He had thought about heading out into the base and getting to work, proving that he was still a vital and useful member of the Rebellion; he had given it serious consideration, and then he had dismissed it. He had decided not to bother, that it wasn’t worth the effort. He had chosen to climb the ladder to his bunk again and hide away.

He didn’t regret that decision at all.

What he did regret, was doing it over and over again. That first time had been excusable. It hadn’t been a childish refusal to help out if he couldn’t get his way, he had been genuinely unable to summon the energy to do anything that might involve interacting with other people. Yes, it had also felt like some kind of personal rebellion against the rules that had been imposed upon him, interpreting the decision in such a way that he  _couldn’t_  help out, he wasn’t allowed. But he had genuinely intended to get back to work the following day. Or maybe the day after.

He just hadn’t done it.

He was fully aware that ‘childish refusal’ was how it might be interpreted by some people around the base, and he didn’t like that. But worse than that was the idea that they might genuinely think he wasn’t allowed to do anything anymore; that he had been banned from even the most basic of tasks as some kind of punishment, or because he couldn’t be trusted.

Not that he cared, of course. People could think whatever they wanted. People had proven very effectively over the past few weeks that most of them were idiots.

He slowed to a stop in a less populated area of the base. Not far away, a single engineer was working on some minor repairs to a ship that Ezra didn’t recognize. The model was familiar to him, but the markings on the hull singled it out as either newly acquired, or recently painted. The images didn’t look like Sabine’s work; the colors were far too muted, but it didn’t look like the work of any other artist he knew of on the base either, and there weren’t many to choose from.

From his distance, and with the sun behind the ship, he couldn’t make out how recent the paint job was, or exactly what it depicted. He took a few steps in that direction to check, or maybe to ask the engineer about it, but hesitated. Whether it was new or newly decorated, its presence demonstrated effectively how out of the loop he had become. Not long ago, he would have known if they had acquired a new ship; he might even have been involved in the mission where they had claimed it. If not, he would definitely have been at the briefing where it had been planned, and would have been privy to the information on how the mission had gone. Not anymore. There was no reason why he couldn’t have been a part of the briefings – at least not as far as he knew – other than that nobody thought to invite him anymore.

They probably thought that he wouldn’t show up. And they were probably right.

Even if the ship was old, not long ago he would have known if it had been decorated. If Sabine was working on a new project, she would have told him about it. At length, and whether he had been interested or not. If someone else were working on a thing like that, she would have known about it, and she would have told him about that too.

She didn’t really talk to him about art anymore. Not long before he had told her about his sight, she had pointed out the sunset, spoken about the colors and the luminescence and the beauty of nature, and how some things couldn’t quite be captured with a spray-can. She didn’t talk like that anymore. Not around Ezra, anyway. More than once since then, he had found her sketching only to see her put her work away as soon as she noticed him, before he could get close enough to see what she was doing. It was as though she didn’t think he could handle seeing it; thinking about it. And maybe she was right, on some days maybe he couldn’t.

But that was  _his_  problem, and other people shouldn’t have to censor themselves just in case he happened to be having a bad day.

He turned away from the ship; whether it was new and what the artwork showed didn’t matter right now, and the last thing he wanted to do was demonstrate to a stranger that he didn’t know what was happening around the base anymore. He could ask someone he trusted about it later.

He headed back to the center of the base. As he did, he watched and listened to the activity surrounding him. A woman he vaguely recognized from the races was pushing a stack of building materials, probably destined to form part of some new structure, through the base on a hovercrate. The distinctive high-pitched whine of the crate grew louder as it approached, and then faded away as it was pushed into the distance. A little ahead of where he was, two people that had pulled maintenance duty were laughing about the commissary food while they emptied trash cans to take to the incinerator.

Ezra couldn’t understand that. Apart from one ridiculously spicy chili, on the whole the food was good, filling, and hadn’t yet made anybody sick. There was nothing to complain about as far as he could tell. Of course, he did have a slightly different perspective on food than some other people.

On the subject of food, it had to be nearing lunch time now, and the smell of something cooking was drifting over the whole area. It had a spicy tang to it that he couldn’t quite place, not something he recognized from Lothal, or from anywhere else he had visited on his travels, but it made his stomach growl. Maybe he would sneak in after the rush, see whether there was anything left.

A loud clatter sounded out over the relative quiet of the base, and every head turned simultaneously in the same direction. Where the woman with the hovercrate had been moments earlier, a man was now standing next to another pile of metal, staring down at it in bewilderment. His crate still hovered in the air, but only at one side; the edge closest to him created a slope down to the ground, with a pile of building materials at the bottom.

Ezra hurried over. The crate was a lost cause, it would probably need new parts, or at the very least a skilled mechanic to fix the malfunctioning antigrav circuits. “You okay?” he asked the man. “Nothing landed on you, did it?”

The man shook his head, still staring at the pile of metal. That was good; he was clearly having a bad enough day already, a trip to the med droid wouldn’t help anything. “Kriff!” he said. “We  _need_  these. If any of them are broken…”

Ezra clasped him on the shoulder. “Hey, these things happen,” he told him. “I’m sure they’re fine, they’re used in construction, right? They should be able to withstand a fall from a few feet.” He hoped. “Want some help loading them onto another crate?”

The man hesitated for maybe half a second, then nodded gratefully.

Ezra grinned, surprised at how good it felt to have something useful to do, even if it was just clearing up a mess. It was a start. Then maybe after he was done, he could offer to help out some more with whatever they were doing. Then maybe later he could talk to Hera about being assigned something to do on a more permanent basis.

Then,  _maybe_  he could even think about reading that message from Noisi and making himself the appointment he had been avoiding. After all, how bad could it be? The worst part had already happened; all this was, was a check-up.

Right?

At least it wouldn’t be boring…


End file.
